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Published in Islam21, No. 38,
January 2005. May also be accessed at www.Islam21.net |
Jihad,
Empire and the Ethics of War and Peace
The use of violence for political goals, it has been argued
with great conviction, has become dysfunctional[1].
And yet, the dismal reality is that
despite its futility as an instrument of public policy, violence has become the
defining norm of our times: it incarnates the supreme value of our world-order
and constitutes the most cogent argument in the ideological, inter-civilisational
dialogue. The moral landscape of our age is strewn with landmines of messianic
terror and imperial hubris, wanton violence and vengeful destruction, suicidal
attacks and pre-emptive strikes, sacred jihads and secular crusades! War or peace,
imperial expansion or popular resistance, world-domination or world-order,
multilateralism or unilateralism, warring tribes or human community are the stark
alternatives that have become the stuff of our nightmares.
The dominant political
discourse today is nothing but a virulent indictment of Muslim activism and an
atavistic exercise in the vilification of Islam itself. Primeval passions
rather than reasoned arguments inform the public debate, just as invective and
diatribe are the order of the day. Simply remaining within the ideational ambit
of Islam is now a personal liability: it entails facing formidable existential
challenges and confronting all the crusading fury of the powers-that-be. The
Muslim must now constantly
run for cover and respond to the imperial demands for compliance and
acquiescence – not only politically but also ideologically, not only militarily
but also morally. Then, there is the escalating spiral of violence and counter-violence - the
total collapse of moral order in the gruesome chain of kidnappings and decapitations in
Fallujah and the annulment of war ethics and sanctioning of sadistic savagery
in Abu-Ghuraib - which provides little incentive for any dispassionate inquiry
and soul-searching.
Nonetheless, if we have to defeat the modern
nihilism with an Islamic face, if we are not to be made hostages to the
dysfunctional logic of violence and counter-violence, if we are not be become
prisoners to the Manichaean rhetoric of Empire and Terror, a frank and
forthright dialogue with modernity, beyond the moral equivocation of the
political intellect or the sham sanctimony of political correctness, is
indispensable. Islam means peace and the Muslim community of today must move
beyond the violence of Terror and Empire both. It must rediscover its original
calling as that of ‘being witness unto mankind, enjoining what is good and
forbidding what is evil’.
One may justifiably argue that for the Muslim
conscience, the only cogent reading of contemporary violence in the merciless
world of Fallujah and Abu Ghuraib is that even within the house of Islam the
nihilistic logic of modernity seems to have triumphed over the demands of faith
and humanity. Still, we must
re-examine the seminal issues of faith and violence, transcendence and
existence, politics and morality that all intersect in the case of war, and
which have been the subject of unending debates and controversies within Islam
and outside it. More specifically, we must return to the seminal doctrine of
Jihad, to which Muslims have tenaciously clung despite all attempts at
vilification from the outside and all efforts to deplete it of existential
finality and decisiveness from the inside. And we must certainly ask, what
complicity, if any, it carries for the unspeakable horrors of Berslan and other
scenes of ‘Islamist’ violence!
Jihad, to express it succinctly and forthrightly, is
the comprehensive and definitive doctrine of classical Islam whose reflexive
ground is the concrete historical moment when the Muslim Self and its Other
(the self determined to terminate Muslim existence) are locked in a mortal
combat. Needless to say that it is in the nature of such an existential premise
that the tension between the moral and the political imperatives of Islamic
conscience can never be fully resolved. For, one may affirm Muslim existence
through wilful action, and may even achieve such an objective, but it can be
done so only at the cost of one’s own life or that of another human being! To
affirm one’s right to existence, when it is physically threatened or
ideologically denied, is then the essence of jihad. The doctrine of jihad annunciates the existential imperative of the
survival of the historical community as a legal norm.
Traditionally understood, jihad enunciates a paradigm
of struggle which is for the most part internal, spiritual and peaceful, but which
also expresses strategic, legal and collective justification, ratio legis, for going to war. More than
that, it articulates a moral framework for regulating the conduct of war, thus
providing a comprehensive theory which incorporates the concerns of both jus ad bellum and jus in
Our goal however is neither to critique the classical
theory nor to present an account of its changing role in the life of the modern
community, but to expose and bring into high relief those aspects of it which
are of concern to the modern man; its perceptions, modes of articulation,
teleological axioms etc that cause much tension in inter-civilisational debates.
To achieve this, we’ll not only look into the unresolved aporia of the
classical theory but also explore the alternative ethical models which have
been proposed by the secular thinkers of our times. But most important of all,
we shall examine them against the evidence of history, against the actual
practice and technique of modern warfare, in order to elicit normative
insights.
The underlying theoretical claim of this inquiry is
that the modern practice of jihad, as carried out by extremist groups, is
transforming the classical doctrine from a legal and communitarian norm into a
personal and pietistic, indeed nihilistic ideology of protest! Further, the
contention is that this perversion of jihad, the doctrine of utmost struggle
and sacrifice for the preservation of faith, into a political ideology of
indiscriminate violence and terror is the most egregious display of the secularised
consciousness of modernity - whatever its rhetoric and ‘Islamic’ pretensions!
Far from being anchored in the legalistic discourse of the fiqh, it represents its negation in theory and a revolt against its
all too pragmatic and mundane logic in practice. Indeed, the fiqhi tradition is now severely indicted
among jihadi groups for fostering a quietist ethos rather than a revolutionary
fervour which their own, modernist reading of the Islamic ethos brings to
relief.
The transition of jihad from fard kifaya to fard ‘ain,
from collective obligation to personal duty, is the most telling sign of the politicisation
of the Muslim mind. For such a modification dispenses with all the stipulations
and provisos of the sacred law and, along with it, the rule of the instrumental
reasoning of the faqih and his
pragmatic benchmark of the maslaha
(wellbeing) of the community. Instead of being a collective decision, reached
after deliberation and debate and proclaimed by the legitimate authority of the
umma, the imam, jihad as the fard ‘ain of the extremists degenerates
into a purely subjective fantasy, a mere whim of undisciplined thought and
fanatical piety. We must, on our part, assert with utmost vigour and sincerity
that jihad as fard ‘ain can only be
internal and peaceful, aimed at the strengthening of the faith, purification of
the soul and not at the promotion of political, perforce parochial, goals. If
it is to become part of an armed struggle, indispensable for the preservation
of the collective self, it must be legal and public, vouchsafed by fiqhi reason and authorised by the
supreme authority. This, at any rate, is how it was understood in the
pre-modern Muslim consciousness, a consciousness which had not been secularised
and which had not struck any deal with the political idols of modernity.
Paradoxically, the proclamation of jihad as fard ‘ain brings into play the same kind
of moral paradoxes and logical aporia which plague modern political theory and
practice when jurists and legal philosophers invoke the concept of the state of
exception, emergency, siege or martial law[2].
However, what to its modern critic, given the secular premises of modern state
theory, is an indictment, may present itself to the Muslim faqih as the ultimate argument for the upholding of the
transcendental ‘law’. The modern protest, questioning the foundational logic of
the secular state-theory itself, expresses itself as: ‘It is certain, in any
case, that if resistance were to become a right or even a duty (the omission of
which could be punished), not only would
the constitution end up positing itself as an absolutely untouchable and
all-encompassing value, but the citizen’s political choice would also end up
being determined by juridical norms.’[3]
Notwithstanding the apparent symmetry of the two
juridical schemes that perceive the state as the supreme value, let’s not be
hasty in our judgment of the Islamic legal tradition. Let’s probe the
underpinnings of the fiqhi discourse,
to deconstruct it as it were, before drawing any definite conclusions about its
role in the global scheme of things. The first striking difference that we notice,
despite the Islamists’ propensity for conceiving
To this, however, we may also add that the legalistic
vision of faith as the immanent community of believers, a contractual entity or
even a constituted body, is neither identical nor coterminous with Islam, the
transcendent faith of a submitting soul, a Muslim. It is a gift of the jurist’s
logic and an inevitable corollary of his methodology of delineating faith as
practice, as law. However, even the legal metaphor of Islam as state cannot be
unanchored from its transcendental and metaphysical moorings. It remains beyond
the ken of political calculus and instrumental rationality. Defining the umma, empirically and concretely and not
merely abstractly and ideally, at this point in history or at any other point
of historical time, remains as problematical and intractable as defining the
individual’s faith. In truth, then, the jurist’s discourse in Islam is not
congruent with any system of positive law which embodies the political will of
the modern, secular state. The ‘secularisation’ of the Shar‘ia as a positive, enforceable law is a modern, post-colonial
heresy.
Ignoring the inquisitional atmosphere within which
all debate about Islam now takes place, we may still ask, in which sense, if at
all, we may construe Shari‘a as the
legal system of an historical order, or the constitution of a polity? Whatever
the response, one thing is certain, namely that every empirical scheme of the
And yet, for his/her commitment to transcendence, the
Muslim too is a child of history. It is worth recalling that the theories of jihad,
though based on the original sources of Islam, the Qur’an and the Sunna, were expounded
at a time when Muslims were an imperial power. It was in ‘the age of Empires’
that the classical ‘ideology’ of jihad achieved its ‘canonical status’, even if
was never universally accepted and its protagonists were not successful in
having it recognised as ‘the sixth pillar of faith’. Yet, there’s no mistaking
that the classical theory bears the stamp of those times. Not only are some of
its provisos imperial in tone and triumphalist in vision, the underlying
premises of its conceptual framework - the division of the world into dar-al-islam and dar-al-harb and the postulation of an eternal conflict between them
- are morally problematical and politically untenable.
Fortunately, these grand ideological schemes are now
only of historical interest and have little practical significance. In fact, the imperial politics that it
endorsed had become defunct long before the coming of modernity which brought
in its own forms of colonialism. At any rate, modern Muslim conscience has no
reason to perpetuate the imperial fantasies of Abbasid or Ottoman ideologues
simply because these are couched in the language of religion. Hopefully,
Islam’s flirtation with the imperial idea is a thing of the, very remote, past.
If the Umma is in search of a vocation
today, it can only find it in the pursuit of egalitarian, liberating and anti-imperialist
goals.
Despite all these, hopefully justified strictures, it
would be naïve and erroneous to dismiss the medieval jurist merely as a tool of
the imperialist ambition. To start with, there is in his discourse the
frustrating ambiguity, or the proverbial ‘con-fusion’, of the contrary demands of
Din and Dawla, of religious mission and worldly empire. And what appears as
an imperial project may as easily be construed as an eschatological metaphor of
faith, a Platonic attempt at the incarnation of a transcendent truth in an
immanent, historical body-politic. Paradoxically, however, despite the
triumphalist dimensions of their vision, nay the Manichean foundations of their
metaphorical expression, the medieval jurists of Islam were on the way to
expounding a theory of international relations that dispensed with the mystical
language of faith and relied more on tangible criteria such as territory and
law!
Seen in this light, then, some of the strictures on
the Muslim contribution to the evolution of ‘International Law’ appear highly
partisan and sectarian, distinguished only by a gratuitous display of
sanctimonious ire. A modern critic, for instance, asserts that ‘The Islamic
distinction between dar al-harb and dar al-islam was
fundamentally different [i.e. from the Augustinian scheme of the heavenly and
the earthly cities] in origin and conception; not only was it juristic rather
than theological, aiming at ensuring right behaviour rather than right
motivation, but it defined the world in control of territory rather than the
invisible progress of divine grace, and it defined membership in the two
spheres by behaviour (submission to God’s will, islam, whether or not it
was accompanied by faith, iman) and not the invisible presence of divine
grace.’[4]!
On our part, we would pay attention neither the
author’s invidious comparison nor to his squeamish Christian rhetoric, but
merely submit that the jurist’s discourse, as it has been duly recognized
within Islam, is zahiri; it is concerned with the outward, empirically
verifiable aspects of the social reality. One may even say that juristic reason
represents the Islamic variant of raison d’état. Thank God that the poor
jurist did not try to measure ‘the invisible presence (or progress) of divine
grace”, or the inner reality of iman, and incorporate them in his
praxis. Had he done so, he would have become indistinguishable from any
inquisitor of the Western church, and perhaps as cruel as well! The notion of
divine grace, however, is indispensable to his system[5].
Blissfully, however, he does not wield it as a confessional scourge! That the
Muslim jurist devised a legal scheme, which was based on ‘rule of law’
and territory rather than on ‘the invisible presence of grace’, today stands
against him. However, when the same principles, territoriality and legal
sovereignty, become, under the aegis of the West, the defining characteristics
of statehood, they are deemed salubrious for mankind!
The Muslim, or Christian, romance with Lady Empire
may be over, but modernity’s heart is aglow with passion for her. In fact, the
modern project discloses itself, more and more to its victims at least, as
inherently, and perhaps even irredeemably, imperialistic. Given the ever-present
challenge of messianic violence and given the resolve of Empire ‘to wage
eternal war for eternal peace’, we may no longer bury our heads in the
proverbial sand and pretend as if our faith has no tryst with history. However,
to renounce the suicidal politics of terror, which we must, does not mean that
we must also swallow the imperial rhetoric of ‘freedom’. We must look modernity
in the eye and not be terrified by its dehumanising gaze. Indeed, no Muslim
thinker may construe modernity as an alien affliction and avoid confronting its
claims, political and imperial but also moral and intellectual, with pious
disregard.
We must ask, does modernity’s claim for
authority inevitably translate into the logic of Empire, or, like any other
universal vision of the human condition, modernity too is plagued by its own
unresolved tensions and inner contradictions? Is modernity inherently an
imperial enterprise, which its rhetoric of ‘enlightenment’ and ‘freedom’ merely
seeks to mask, or does it genuinely cherish hopes of a universal peace that is
based on justice and equality for all? Do the power-brokers of modernity, to
say it bluntly, honestly believe in a world order without the exploitation and
enslavement of the weak by the powerful, or do they employ their rhetoric in a
cynical vein just to further their own interests? Indeed, to come to the most
disturbing insight of all, is modernity’s commitment to freedom incommensurate with a world order in which justice is the defining norm? Asking
these questions may not be construed as a vain exercise in polemics but as an
honest bid to determine the orientation of Islamic calling today.
We must
realize that while Enlightenment as the foundational myth of modernity is
optimistic about the future of an ever-emancipating humanity and promises us a
world without violence, the imperial project of modernity seldom redeems that
promise. In fact, it is no exaggeration to claim that war and violence must be
construed as intrinsic to the modern project, and not merely parts of its
prehistory. And yet, modernization theory, the standard interpretation of
contemporary history, posits, more or less implicitly that modernity is
peaceful. In fact, in the post-World War theory, the non-violent resolution of
conflicts is presumed to be the defining feature of modernity. The influential
texts of modern theory, one may say without diffidence, contain hardly any
mention of war and peace. Nonetheless, it is true to say that the most palpable
tension within the political thought of modernity concerns the dreams of a
pacifist utopia and the realities of power-politics. Obviously, like any other
universal vision, modernity cannot escape the logical contradiction, and
existential unity, of the Empire-Mission nexus. It too exhibits the logic of Din and Dawla as the two opposite sides of the single coin of its project. In
this, it discloses itself as any other universal project, Islam including.
Significantly, however, the claim of
Enlightenment reason to be sovereign, to be a norm unto itself, has some very disquieting
ramifications for the modern project. Its historical unfolding, it has become
apparent by now, leads to the gradual denial of transcendence, a cognitive
vision that terminates in the moral wasteland nihilism, in the replacement of
will-to-truth by will-to-power. (In their pursuit of nihilistic goals, and
suicidal terror, Muslim extremist reveal that they too are the children of
modernity.) One of the most disturbing insights into the nihilistic ends of the
modern project comes from the sombre sociological studies of Zygmunt Bauman,
whose inquiry into the Jewish Holocaust led him to conclude that the Holocasut
does not constitute a peculiarity of the German history, or an aberration of
the modernist ethos[6].
There is instead a direct link between modernity’s bureaucratic rationality and
its politics of genocide – a practice that was by no means rare in the modern
enterprise of the colonization of non-European peoples[7].
In a radical but well-documented work, Modernity and the Holocaust, Bauman
demonstrated that the Holocaust is the obverse of modernity; that it represents
'another face of the same modern society whose other, more familiar, face we so
admire. And that the two faces are perfectly comfortably attached to the same
body.' The Holocaust, he insisted further, cannot be dismissed as the failure
of civilization, as the 'hiccups of barbarism' that humanity has to suffer
through only temporarily. No, it is part of the same 'morally elevating story
of humanity's march towards greater freedom and rationality' that forms the
imperious, nay imperial, myth of modernity and Enlightenment. Of course, modern
civilization was not, according to him, the Holocaust's sufficient condition; but 'it was most certainly its necessary condition. Bauman further
insinuated that reason not passion, civilization not barbarity, science not
superstition, imperils the existence of man as a moral being. He even argued
that the bureaucratic logic of the modern state inevitably translates into the
imperative of 'final solutions' and that the value-free epistemology of modern
science indubitably redeems its claim in the merciless world of the gas
chambers. Obviously, Bauman’s work has great relevance for any non-Western
attempt to appraise modernity as Empire.
Modernity views itself as the emergence of a new
consciousness, as the emancipation of man from the shackles of religion and
superstition; in a word, as enlightenment. However, modernity is not a mere
Platonic idea; it is a historical epoch and a worldly project. The
paradigm-shift that modernity accomplishes is then best observed through a
study of its politics rather than of its philosophies. In modernity, the
organic link between the state, war and legal order, occluded during medieval
times by the theories of Jihad and Holy War with their allusions to
transcendence, appears clearly in the daylight of the secular sun[8].
If war was the midwife of the modern nation-state, military technology was its
handmaiden. As soon as the newly constituted nations of
A vivid picture of the colonial ‘warfare’, and its warrior
ethic, may be obtained by revisiting the battle scene of
Sven Lindqvist: ‘So ended the battle at
Of all the gadgets of modern technology, nothing
has caused more moral havoc than the airplane and the novelty of bombing from
above which it introduced. Today, this novelty is the norm of civilized warfare
and an incontestable fact of its superiority. The airplane has clearly
established itself, from Abyssinia to
The Swedish title, which is far less innocuous
than the non-descript English rendition as A
History of Bombing, translates as ‘You are dead now!’, and actually refers
to the game that children play when they act like soldiers. The title alludes
thus to the feeling of sport, exhilaration and adventure which according to the
author is inherent in the aerial nature of the enterprise itself. A stark
example of this comes from Mussolini’s son, Bruno, himself a pilot, who during
the Abyssinian war recorded has impression of the new sadistic sport as: ‘We
set them all on fire; the hillocks, fields, small villages… It was really entertaining..
Hardly had the bombs reached the ground before they burst in white flames; an
enormous blaze struck and the dry grass started burning. I thought of the
animals. God, how they ran…. When the bomb-racks had been emptied, I started
throwing them by hand…. It was really funny….
Encircled by a ring of fire, 5000 Abyssinians went to a horrible death.
It was a real inferno down below.’!
Indeed, one of the earliest moral apprehensions against
the new practice was just that it fostered a sense of omnipotence and
invulnerability in the pilot who, secure,
unchallenged and high above, could play with his victims as he pleased! (The
evolution of defensive technology may have made the pilots less secure, but the
sense of power and invulnerability, I presume, persists.) The moral perplexity,
or plain duplicity, which the custom of aerial bombing introduces in the ethic
of war is also painfully manifest to a modern theorist who laments that by
allowing those moral rules to recede from our collective conscious, ‘we now
find ourselves in the odd position that the crew of a plane who have been
bombing a civilian target in clear breach of the rules of war may be shot down,
captured, and claim humane treatment under the same rules of law.[11]’
In sum, if there’s ever a single, continuous thread in this moral tangle, it is
that of terror. The history of bombing is quite simply a history of terror. It
is not merely accidental then that the opening salvo of the latest
War, it has been the distressing insight of many
a perceptive political thinker, is the linchpin of all statehood. The state
exists to master violence, which is the necessary condition for all law. Prior
to modernity, however, statehood was never a sovereign principle of politics. It
was always subservient to a higher, transcendent, and ultimately universal
authority. Secular statehood, on the other hand, forfeits all claims to
‘universality’ for the safeguarding of its ‘sovereignty’. The paradoxical
outcome however is that the claim of modern theory stretches far beyond the recognition
of the parochiality of the human condition, which is a given of all human
thought. For it legitimizes it as the
political norm, as the human ideal. Stripped of all transcendental trappings,
strategic theory now redeems its ideational promise, with the help of the pragmatic
calculus of Realpolitik, in the radically
secularized ideology of war. The concept of ‘total war’, which was unknown in
the pre-modern world, is one such gift of the doctrine of state-sovereignty. For
the nation-state, it has been duly noted, ‘mobilizes the total resources of the
society in pursuit of its political goals, and it is the nation of its adversary that it attacks in order to achieve
victory.’[12]
The claim of the sovereignty of the state, and
by extension that of the nation, shifts the focus of the moral vision from authority to power, from transcendence to immanence, and, in the final resort,
from right to might. True enough, politics, conceived as the art of the
possible, cannot remain indifferent to the pragmatic claims of reason and
history. However, the political will in modernity, supremely cognizant of the
freedom of the human spirit, need not heed any call that demands obedience and
submission. Now that the universe that science has revealed to us is found to
be bereft of any value, lacking in any expression of non-human volition, only
that is real which is possible. The denial of any transcendent source of
authority which is one of the cardinal claims of modern consciousness, thus
transforms all politics into power-politics, a realm of coercion masquerading
as the art of the possible. It also reveals the nihilistic foundations of modernity
as an imperialist project, an ever-expanding regime whose ultimate source of
authority is power.
In the following article, we’ll further examine,
in the mirror of modernity, some features of this ‘realistic’ view of politics
that ultimately removes all distinction between facts and norms. We’ll also
explore the dialectics of war and peace that terminates in the moral obscenity
and logical impossibility of modern slogans like ‘eternal war for eternal
peace’!
(To
be continued…)
[1] Schell, J: The Unconquerable World. Metropolitan books, 2003.
[2] For an incisive treatment of this
notorious conundrum of modern jurisprudence, provocatively brought into high
relief by Carl Schmitt, vid. Giorgio Agamben: The State of
[3] Ibid.
p. 11. (Emphasis added.)
[4] Johnson, James Turner: The Holy War Idea in Western and Islamic
Traditions.
[5] Manzoor, P.S: ‘Legal Rationality vs. Arbitrary Judgement:
Re-examining the tradition of Islamic Law’, in Muslim World Book Review, vol. 21; no. 1 (December2000), pp. 3-13.
[6] Bauman, Zygmunt: Modernity
and Genocide.
[7] In a number of well-known studies, the Swedish writer Sven
Lindqvist has argued, with ample evidence in hand, that Europe’s colonial wars
against the ‘natives’ were genocidal in nature. The Holocaust, he claimed
further, was not a unique expression of ‘evil’ but may in some measure be
regarded as a continuation of the policies which imperial powers, especially
[8] Bobbitt, Philip: The
Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History.
[9] Kiernan, V.G: The Lords of Human Kind. Hammondsworth,
Penguin Books, 1972. p. 117.
[10] Op. cit. vid. n. 7 supra.
[11] Clark, Stephen R :Civil
Peace and Sacred Order.